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Operating Maguire Gravimetric Blender Units Reach 40,000

Maguire Products Inc. has announced that 10,000 of its weigh scale blenders (WSB) are now operating in Europe and 40,000 are in place worldwide — 33% more than just four years ago.

The announcement coincided with the introduction of a six-ingredient WSB with four removable bins for additives and colors, and a mid-sized version of the MaxiBatch blender for powders — the latest in a long series of improvements and innovations to the WSB, according to Paul Edmondson, general manager of Maguire Europe.

“Instead of attempting to supply the broadest range of plastics auxiliary equipment, Maguire has focused on continuous improvement of a few select products, like the WSB, for which our company possesses specialized technology and a unique approach to equipment design,” said Edmondson. “Over the years we have worked to broaden the applicability of the WSB while keeping it lower in cost, simpler in design, and easier to use than alternative blenders such as loss-in-weight and volumetric systems. Another factor in the success of our blender is the comprehensive five-year warranty package that covers all of the equipment we build.”

Edmondson cited five reasons for continued rapid growth in sales of the Maguire WSB: 1) the advantages of the system in terms of economy, productivity, and quality assurance; 2) its ready adaptability to plant-wide networking and material management systems; 3) the development of new blender capabilities for handling wood flour, bulk powders, liquid colorants, and micro-dosed additives; 4) the spread of WSB use beyond molding and extrusion to such industry sectors as compounding and wire and cable; and 5) sales of the WSB to rapidly growing geographic markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Mounted directly over the throat of an extruder or molding press, or alongside the processing machine, the WSB blends and meters batches of resin, regrind, and additives in recipe ratios that can be varied from 0.01 to 100% with simple thumb-wheel or touch-screen settings. For each batch, the WSB sequentially dispenses all ingredients, in their targeted recipe proportions, from separate hopper bins into a weigh chamber. From there the batch falls into a mixing chamber, and then is fed directly into the processing machine. In subsequent batches, small corrections are made automatically, including adjustments to compensate for variations in extrusion rate or bulk density. This “gain-in-weight” operation maintains batch accuracy to within +/- 0.1%.

The WSB quickly pays for itself by maintaining material consumption within tight tolerances and ensuring product consistency, Edmondson noted. “The dosing precision of the Maguire WSB has caused processors who once used expensive pre-colored resins to employ our equipment for blending of virgin resin and masterbatch. Others have adopted the WSB because it enables them to incorporate regrind with greater confidence, yielding a homogeneous blend of regrind with virgin resin and additives. And molders who operate specialized, small-throughput production lines or manufacture technical components now use the WSB because of the data it yields for quality management and documentation.”

Maguire Products Inc., headquartered in Aston, PA, is the world’s largest supplier of gravimetric blenders and liquid color pumps and also manufactures loading systems, dryers, auger feeders, and related equipment and software. For more information, visit www.maguire.com.